Calibration of a 3D laser rangefinder and a camera based on optimization solution

Abstract

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>The calibration of a 3D laser rangefinder (LRF) and a camera is a key technique in the field of computer vision and intelligent robots. This paper proposes a new method for the calibration of a 3D LRF and a camera based on optimization solution. The calibration is achieved by freely moving a checkerboard pattern in front of the camera and the 3D LRF. The images and the 3D point clouds of the checkerboard pattern in various poses are collected by the camera and the 3D LRF respectively. By using the images, the intrinsic parameters and the poses of the checkerboard pattern are obtained. Then, two kinds of geometric constraints, line-to-plane constraints and plane-to-plane constraints, are constructed to solve the extrinsic parameters by linear optimization. Finally, the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters are further refined by global optimization, and are used to compute the geometric mapping relationship between the 3D LRF and the camera. The proposed calibration method is evaluated with both synthetic data and real data. The experimental results show that the proposed calibration method is accurate and robust to noise.